♀Magdeleine Landry

Magdeleine Landry (died 1756) was an Acadian woman of Rivière-aux-Canards, in the Minas district of Acadia, who was deported to England with her husband and children and died at Falmouth, in Cornwall, in 1756, while her own parents were deported to Boston. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through her daughter Anne Granger (c. 1743 – 1811).

Family and the sources

Nearly everything known of her comes from the sworn declarations that her children and in-laws made in February 1767 on Belle-Île-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany, where the exiles had been resettled. The declaration of her son-in-law Jean Baptiste Thériot, made on 15 February 1767, names her parents as Jean Landry and Madeleine Melançon, “tous deux transportés à Boston”, both carried to Boston, and names their own parents, Antoine Landry and Marie Thibodeau and Philippe Melancon and Marie Dugas, as having died in the parish of Saint-Charles at Les Mines. Her parents and she were thus sent to opposite sides of the Atlantic: in the expulsion of 1755 the British shipped the Acadians to scattered destinations, and families were divided between them.

The declarations do not say where or when she was born, nor where she married Jean Baptiste Granger. She was probably born about 1722. She most likely married him about 1740, the year before their first child was born. The couple lived at Rivière-aux-Canards, in the parish of Saint-Joseph, where their five known children were born between 1741 and 1752, among them Marie Marguerite on 8 January 1741 and Anne about 1743.

Exile and death

The family was held with the Acadian exiles at Falmouth, and the 1767 declarations record that she and her husband both died there; the one made at Le Palais, closed on 2 March 1767, gives the year as 1756. The parish register of St Gluvias, Penryn, where the Falmouth exiles were buried, records her husband’s burial on 23 October 1756. Her children survived the internment. Her daughter Anne married Jean Chrysostome Trahan at Falmouth on 10 January 1763, and by 1767 both daughters were settled on Belle-Île with their husbands, Marie Marguerite at Le Cosquet in the parish of Locmaria and Anne at Kerlan in the parish of Bangor, where her youngest son, Jean-Baptiste, was living in Anne’s household.

Notes

Her birth

Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians (1978), volume 3, lists the children of her parents, Jean Landry and Madeleine Melançon, and gives a daughter written Madeleine, born in 1722. The Grand-Pré register has baptisms for other children of the couple but none for a Madeleine in 1722, so the year rests on Arsenault alone.

Her marriage

Bona Arsenault’s history of the Acadians (volume 3) puts the marriage about 1740, the year before the first child was born. That is a compiled genealogy’s date, not a record: no record of the marriage survives. The register of Saint-Joseph de la Rivière-aux-Canards, where the family lived, is lost, and the published abstracts of the Grand-Pré register have no entry for the couple, so the place of the marriage is not known.

Her burial

No burial for her has been identified in the published list of the Penryn burials. The register enters married women under their husbands’ surnames, the list names several Grangé women but no Magdeleine, and it describes itself as incomplete.